News from the SCD Community

The database now has the current version of MiniCribs. There were some minor problems with the update process that needed to be sorted out, most of which had to do with the Django 1.7 update, and that resulted in a fairly long delay. But I hope that future updates will proceed a lot faster!

The automated import process manages to connect approximately 97% of the 4500+ cribs to the corresponding dances in the database. The vast majority of the remaining cribs belongs to dances that we don't yet have in the database; we're working on getting these added, and at that point they will hopefully also be imported correctly.

Videos for dance lists are back! In the Strathspey SCD Database, You can now select the “Videos” tab on a dance list detail page and see videos for all the dances that have them.

Generally, the video shown for a dance is the one with the highest quality level. If there are several videos at the highest quality level for that dance (e.g., several “Good” ones when no “Demonstration quality” video exists) then one of those is chosen at random.

Eventually we want to introduce an “Editor's Pick” badge where we explicitly designate one of the available videos as the preferred one to be used in contexts like the dance list “Videos” tab.

This year has been particularly good for Scottish Country Dancing, and we couldn't be more thrilled at the level of engagement from enthusiastic dancers around the globe. From our ever-popular Summer School, which attracts hundreds of dancers worldwide, to the Commonwealth Ceilidh being observed across five continents, this year achieved a truly global presence, and we have all of you to thank for…

The RSCDS office will be closed from 5pm on Friday December 19th, and will be re-opening on January 5th. If you would like to get in touch with any member of staff, please do so before the office closes for the holiday season.

If you are looking to purchase an item from the store, please be aware that we will not be processing any orders after December 19th. If you would like anything delivered…

There appears to have been an outage of the Strathspey (web) Server earlier today, which I am unfortunately not in a position to investigate in detail (being in Portugal and all that). I restarted the web server and it appears to run, and we should all keep our fingers crossed that it will continue for the next few days because I don't really know if and when I'm going to be online.

(Before you ask: I used to have an automatic check that would advise me if the server was down, but my mobile phone data plan doesn't work outside Germany, and the infrastructure in question wasn't quite carried across to the new server machine in the first place. I'm going to look into crash-proofing the server better when I'm home after next Sunday.)

At 5pm this evening the RSCDS website will be undergoing maintenance and some users may experience a delay in page response or login difficulty. The maintenance will not take long and the website should be up and running as normal later in the evening.

Users may also experience a delay in page response or login difficulty on Tuesday December 9th, as another maintenance upgrade will be taking pl…